Women's choice and anti-natal policies

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

One consistent policy position of modern socialists is a hard-line pro-choice position for women. This is good - women should have autonomy over their bodies. However, why are anti-abortion laws the only ones which come under scrutiny, and not policies which pressure women to get abortions or sterilizations? One example is the one-child policy in China, where women are often forced to have abortions, etc. Now FARC is accused of such a thing too.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-35082412

There are many other examples (forced sterilizations under Indira Gandhi in India, etc)

Why is the Leftist defense of a woman's right to chose so focused on the right to chose an abortion, and not the right to chose to take a child to term? Why don't such policies come for criticism as often as criticism of antiabortion laws? The consistent position is (for me at least) obviously that women get to make this choice either way, and that both are equally important for bodily autonomy.

[Rudolf]

The reason is obviously intimately linked with race and class. The restrictions on white fairly well off women's reproduction tends to be about pressure to full time motherhood and housework yet for poor and WoC its around population control, restricting financial means (e.g. benefit reductions), sterilisation (both forced and officially not), removing children from their parents etc.

The reason the left tends to focus on access to abortion is because of the marginalisation of poor and WOC and the dominance of rich white women in historic feminist movements.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

The reason is obviously intimately linked with race and class. The restrictions on white fairly well off women's reproduction tends to be about pressure to full time motherhood and housework yet for poor and WoC its around population control, restricting financial means (e.g. benefit reductions), sterilisation (both forced and officially not), removing children from their parents etc.

The reason the left tends to focus on access to abortion is because of the marginalisation of poor and WOC and the dominance of rich white women in historic feminist movements.

I don't think this is the case.

First of all, the term "people/women of colour" is problematic, not just because it sounds like a bloody joke (like some sort of fascist infiltrator tried to get a bunch of uptight politically-correct college kids to say "coloureds"), but because it completely erases the specificity of various ethnic and colour groups. If I recall correctly, you live in the US. And there is simply no comparing, for example, native Americans and blacks in the US. The policy of the American bourgeoisie toward the former has included biological and cultural extermination - and yes, sterilisation was part of this. The same goes for the Aborigines in Australia, or the Roma under the Stalinist hardliner regime of Novotny. But toward the black colour-caste, the US bourgeoisie as a whole never had an exterminationist perspective. How could they, when low-paid black labour was and remains one of the bases of US capitalism, and allows for high profit to be had even in the imperialist metropole. Sterilisation was used against black women - but not all of them, and the perspective was always to punish the "promiscuous", i.e. those that undermined the family, as well as incidentally the "retarded" etc.

But for most black women, like for most white women in the US, the chief problem is that motherhood is forced on them. Abortion restrictions target the poorest women disproportionately, of which a disproportionate amount will be black. That benefits are being slashed across the board does not mean that capitalist society has abandoned forced motherhood. Quite the contrary - capitalism needs, not just the biological reproduction of people, but the social reproduction of the proletariat as a dispossessed class forced to sell its labour-power. Therefore the family and poverty go hand in hand for the bourgeoisie - any measure by which individual women control their sexuality, including their pregnancies, as well as anything that alleviates poverty, is problematic to them.

Anti-abortion laws come under more scrutiny because they're more widespread. Every state that currently exists on this planet has some restrictions on abortions, restrictions that need to be fought. Sterilisation policies are comparatively rare, and usually restricted. Many of them have been recognised and denounced by the left, e.g. Fujimori's campaign against indigenous Peruvians. On the other hand, there is simply no comparing laws that restrict abortion and the one-child policy in terms of severity or impact. Furthermore, while the one-child policy is an excellent example of bureaucratic politics - the tail wagging the dog - it was, in 1979, sadly the most realistic option to avert a crisis caused by the pro-natalist policies of Mao. (These were, of course, the usual stupid Maoist approach - throw bodies and elan at the problem! Formulate a slogan and run society by campaigns! Don't think, enthuse!)

[Rudolf]

If I recall correctly, you live in the US.

Nah im in the UK.


I don't think this is the case.

First of all, the term "people/women of colour" is problematic, not just because it sounds like a bloody joke (like some sort of fascist infiltrator tried to get a bunch of uptight politically-correct college kids to say "coloureds"), but because it completely erases the specificity of various ethnic and colour groups. If I recall correctly, you live in the US. And there is simply no comparing, for example, native Americans and blacks in the US. The policy of the American bourgeoisie toward the former has included biological and cultural extermination - and yes, sterilisation was part of this. The same goes for the Aborigines in Australia, or the Roma under the Stalinist hardliner regime of Novotny. But toward the black colour-caste, the US bourgeoisie as a whole never had an exterminationist perspective. How could they, when low-paid black labour was and remains one of the bases of US capitalism, and allows for high profit to be had even in the imperialist metropole. Sterilisation was used against black women - but not all of them, and the perspective was always to punish the "promiscuous", i.e. those that undermined the family, as well as incidentally the "retarded" etc.

But for most black women, like for most white women in the US, the chief problem is that motherhood is forced on them. Abortion restrictions target the poorest women disproportionately, of which a disproportionate amount will be black. That benefits are being slashed across the board does not mean that capitalist society has abandoned forced motherhood. Quite the contrary - capitalism needs, not just the biological reproduction of people, but the social reproduction of the proletariat as a dispossessed class forced to sell its labour-power. Therefore the family and poverty go hand in hand for the bourgeoisie - any measure by which individual women control their sexuality, including their pregnancies, as well as anything that alleviates poverty, is problematic to them.

Anti-abortion laws come under more scrutiny because they're more widespread. Every state that currently exists on this planet has some restrictions on abortions, restrictions that need to be fought. Sterilisation policies are comparatively rare, and usually restricted. Many of them have been recognised and denounced by the left, e.g. Fujimori's campaign against indigenous Peruvians. On the other hand, there is simply no comparing laws that restrict abortion and the one-child policy in terms of severity or impact. Furthermore, while the one-child policy is an excellent example of bureaucratic politics - the tail wagging the dog - it was, in 1979, sadly the most realistic option to avert a crisis caused by the pro-natalist policies of Mao. (These were, of course, the usual stupid Maoist approach - throw bodies and elan at the problem! Formulate a slogan and run society by campaigns! Don't think, enthuse!)


There's something missing though. What if capital has no use for you? The sterilisations in Puerto Rico, for example, the govt cited poverty and unemployment iirc.

Obviously not as dramatic as that but there was a charity going around the UK a few years back paying a few hundred pounds to drug addicts to sterilise them. There's the constant discourse over how something needs to be done about "the underclass breeding". The discourse around benefits in the UK is centred on unemployment being a hereditary trait.

This isn't to suggest any abandonment of forced motherhood but instead the distinction between the motherhood of the desirables and the undesirables.